


Many of My Lovers

by kla1991



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-10-28 14:10:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10832892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kla1991/pseuds/kla1991
Summary: Pete has a plan to get Myka and HG together. It involves returning to an old conversation.





	Many of My Lovers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vestwearer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vestwearer/gifts).



            Pete was the last one to catch on to how Myka and HG pined after each other. Which was super dumb and embarrassing, because HG had been back for a month now, and she and Myka didn’t even talk in complete sentences half the time because they just finished what the other was saying anyway. They had quiet conversations with each other and sat close and watched each other come into and leave rooms. Myka kept HG on her right side at the table during meals because HG ate with her left hand like a weird British person and kept elbowing everybody else; she and Myka moved around each other like they’d choreographed it. It was really obvious.

            Although the girls didn’t seem to know that they were super in love, either, so maybe Pete wasn’t the only one who was super dumb.

            “Are you sure you want to get involved in that?” Leena asked when Pete started hatching plans. “They’re both really private people.”

            “Yeah, except for that time HG made her big ‘I like girls’ announcement in the middle of the office, which… Aha!”

            He kissed Leena on the cheek and bounded off to perfect his scheme.

            It began two nights later, when the girls were on the couch together, reading. Myka had finally broken her habit of wearing shoes in the house, and her socked toes were tucked under HG’s thigh; HG’s arm was draped over Myka’s bent knees.

            Gross. For a minute, Pete reconsidered encouraging this. But then he flumped down into a chair and sighed.

            Myka had spent years building up a tolerance for Pete’s attention-begging, but HG got tired of his groaning and fidgeting within a minute.

  
            “What, Pete?” she snapped.

            “Oh, nothing.”

            HG rolled her eyes, but before she could start reading again, Pete continued.

            “I was just reminiscing, you know? About all the great dates I’ve had.”

            “Right, because that happens often,” Myka teased.

            “Hey, I’ve had lots of great dates!” Pete almost started listing them, but he was getting distracted. “And it sounds like you might have, too, right HG?”

            Myka was paying her full attention, now, and HG set her book completely aside.

            “What are you on about?”

            “You told us, remember? ‘Many of my lovers were men.’ I said I’d come back to that!”

            “Don’t be gross, Pete,” Myka said, in the same instant that HG asked, “What is there to come back to, exactly?”

            “Oh, you know, just wondering what dating was like back then. What did the great HG Wells do to woo a girl, before she became a billion years old?”

            HG made a disgusted sound and leaned away from him on the couch, throwing her arm along the back of it. Pete followed her gaze out the window, onto the rolling green of the lawn, the gardens that Leena planted every year according to star charts and instinct. Myka fidgeted, sitting up to get a better look at HG’s unreadable face. It hadn’t occurred to Pete that he might upset HG, but Myka’s stiff shoulders, the way her eyes darted over every detail of the other woman’s face, made him worry for a second. Then, like the sunlight breaking through the branches of Leena’s ancient oak tree, HG smiled.

            “Violets.”

            Pete looked at the clumps of little flowers under the tree, planted in among the daffodils.

            “I thought that was just for men,” Myka said.

            “What’s for men?”

            “Violets,” HG said again. “We wore them as a sort of signal, it indicated that a man or a woman was… alternatively inclined.”

            “So you wore them as like a, ‘Hello ladies!’ kind of deal. Did you give them to people?”

            “Certainly. At my most romantic, I was wont to press them between the pages of letters. They gave the paper a lovely scent, much subtler than a spritz of perfume.”            

            Okay, so HG had old-fashioned game. That figured.

            “What else? Walks in the country?”

            “Always,” HG said. “With picnics.”

            “Ooh, did you get all Betty Crocker on the lady?” Pete asked, and he was impressed when HG knew what he meant.

            “Dear god no, I never baked for people I liked.”

            Myka shot Pete a look, and they both shuddered at the memory of Claudia’s last birthday party—it’d taken all of them two hours to clean everything up before Leena got home and found the mess.

            “Any serenades? Instrument playing, fancy talent show-offs?”

            “I was never musically talented, no. I did impress one woman when I nearly bested her in an archery competition, but most of my talents didn’t serve well for flirtation.”

            Myka giggled and pushed HG’s leg with her foot. “You never swept someone off their feet with one of your hare-brained inventions?”

            HG pursed her lips in thought, and murmured, “I suppose I did give it a go once.”

            “Archery? Seriously? You have _got_ to show me…” HG’s attention barely shifted out of her own thoughts, and Pete realized he was going to lead the whole conversation away from the point if he bugged her more. “Later, later.”

            The three of them were quiet for a minute, Pete watching the two girls avoid each other’s eyes.

            “I bet those letters were fancy, though, huh? You remember any of ‘em?”

            HG drifted back to reality, sighing. “Not word for word, but I remember what they were like.”

            Pete was leaning forward now, elbows on his knees. He spread his hands, inviting HG to continue.

            And she did. For a whole five minutes she recited fancy prose that wasn’t at all how Pete would string a sentence together, and he tried to remember as much as he could without literally taking notes, because Myka was enraptured. She’d melted into the arm of the couch, gazing up at HG while she talked. HG was still looking out the window, but her arm drifted down and settled with her palm on Myka’s knee, and it was just… so obvious. Except for the part where HG went to bed right after she’d finished, and Myka went back to reading, and they both went to their separate bedrooms and came down to breakfast the next day and dodged each other’s elbows like nothing had happened.

            Pete was prepared for that, though. Pete had a plan. It involved cutting up some of Leena’s beautiful plants and voluntarily writing more than a few sentences, but it was a good plan.

            He slid an envelope under Myka’s door and waited for the glorious romance to unfold. In his dreams, his best friend was beaming, and her new official girlfriend knew damn well she was the luckiest woman ever, and they were showering him with gratitude for his clever ruse before they rode off into the sunset on like, a horse or something. HG hadn’t mentioned horses, but she could probably ride one, right?

            At six in the morning the next day, his day off, Myka barged into the room and tossed the letter down on his chest where he was still laying in bed.

            “You seriously abused a thesaurus for that,” she told him. “And you misspelled ‘Thames.’”

            The look on her face was definitely not “beaming.” He didn’t need Roget to tell him that this look and that word were not synonyms.

            “It’s not t-e-h-m—“

            Myka didn’t even correct him. She just snarled, “Is this a joke? Is it… is it April Fool’s Day or something?”

            “I replaced your twizzlers with lovingly melted down and re-molded hot cinnamon candy for April Fool’s, you just haven’t tried to eat one yet.”

            There was steam coming out of Myka’s ears, kinda like Pete had imagined would happen when she ate one of the fake twizzlers. It really wasn’t funny, though, especially when she stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind her.

            He was in the middle of getting tangled up in his pants, in a totally not-ridiculous way, when HG slammed his door open and launched way too many questions at once at him.

            “What happened, was that Myka, is she alright, what did you do? And do you know you’re putting the wrong leg in your trousers?”

            “Why do you assume I did anything?” Pete whined, but HG was already ignoring him.

            He’d flung the letter off of himself when he got out of bed, and some of the violets he’d pressed were scattered on the floor. HG was turning one over in her hands when Pete finally got his pants on right.

            “Listen, go back to bed, I’m gonna go—“

            “No,” HG barked. “No, I think you’ve done enough. I’ll handle it.”

            It wasn’t like he could go back to bed, though, so Pete shut the door behind HG and nervously read _Batwoman_ comics for half an hour before he went downstairs to assess the damage.

            The evidence in the kitchen—pot on the stove, a little loose tea spilled on the counter—told him that HG had made tea, because of course she did. No one had come up the stairs, though, and no one was in the living room. Pete went into the sun room, also empty, and was about to yell for them when Leena put a hand on his shoulder and pressed a finger to her own lips.

            On the far side of the garden, away from where the violets were planted, there was a wrought iron bench that faced down the hill, to the end of Leena’s well-tended grass and across the scrubby, dusty badlands.

            Sitting on the bench together, having a small picnic of tea and biscuits, were Myka and HG. Myka’s arm was around Helena’s waist, and Helena’s head was on Myka’s shoulder. The early morning sun lit up the love in their eyes.

            They were definitely going to kill Pete when they came inside, but that was okay with him.

**Author's Note:**

> The revenge: Pete assumed Myka would throw out the hot cinnamon twizzlers and get a new pack now that he'd revealed the prank. When she offered him one, he didn't suspect a thing.


End file.
